These days, landing pages are being used very frequently, even though they have evolved from the cheesy designs and glaring oddities.

Modern day landing pages come with sexy designs and the best compelling copies, that can convince you in seconds.

We’ve seen many good examples of modern, sleek looking landing pages, which are eye candies but when it comes to search engine optimization, I’ve seen that not all of them are fool-proof. Which is what we would discuss here today.

1. Its not about one keyword anymore, focus on the contextual category !

Earlier, you could get away with search engines by optimizing for one keyword and rearranging all the stemmed keywords around it. Like “seo tips, seo optimization, seo google” and things like that.

But clearly, search engines have evolved a lot. The wise thing to do is to spread out your list of keywords along a plain path. This is different from “stemming”, where a core keyword is repeated with combination keywords in and around the page.

Doing so, might not harm you but it wouldn’t stand a chance to get the attention it deserves with the search engines as it will fit safely into the brackets of the “old school stemming agenda”.

So, the key is to diversify your keywords, and focus on the category and context rather than a single keyword.

2. Repetition and keyword density is not the key, but relevance is

As mentioned in the earlier point, one could easy get away with repeating the targeted keyword to a calculated average density and get picked up by search engines.

But the relevancy factor has gone ahead of this simple criteria and now revolves around metrics such as relevancy, context, references and traction.

Search engine robots are clever enough to figure out if the copy was written for search engines or otherwise, from scanning it, so don’t make the evident mistakes of focusing too much on one or a few set of keywords.

Instead of focusing on “Red apple, Blue Apple, Green Apple”, one might want to focus more on “Apples, Orchards, Fruits” and the like.

3. Do not completely disregard the Old school SEO, certain parts still work.

Like code optimization, clean code and semantic markup. Make sure that you use the core concepts like the Page Titles, Heading tags and all the SEO basics in place without ignoring them.

4. Cool graphics are alright but also optimize the code accordingly.

Search Engines have evolved much to figure out how to parse and scan heavy graphics and multimedia content, but the page load time is one such important factor you might not want to ignore. If you have heavy graphics make arrangements to make them load fast. Quick delivery is a key factors as we’ve seen Google put too much focus on it lately.

5. Highlight the best parts that needs focus in the content.

There are more than one way of doing it but one way I’d personally recommend doing is to highlight important phrases (that gives contextuality to the content) by including them cleverly in to the heading copy and interlinking them with the page with anchor text, particularly if its a long page.

Search Engines are picking up “inter-page links” these days and if not a direct clue, definitely passes a signal about the content to search engines.

Apart from these points, the regular search engine optimization strategies can be employed and social media can be used to bring in some traction to the page.

Gone are those days when you build a good foundation and leave it at that for the search engines to pick up and say “Wow, this is amazing stuff”.

These days, they say a lot of amazing pages, so the key is to make them say “Ah ! This is a better one among the lot, and its popular too, let’s pick this up”.